When in Rome
by bellmare
Summary: when you're a demon, live as the demons do. — Digital Devil Saga AU; Souji, Yosuke.


**Notes; tw: cannibalism. Digital Devil Saga AU, grossness abounds. No kissing, just grossness. You've been warned.**

**.**

"Sometimes," Yosuke says and then stops. Souji glances at him sidelong. Many thoughts run through Yosuke's head - none of them very flattering, mostly along the vein of, _haha, wow, you look like shit_ followed by, _oh, wait, we all look like shit. _

The Midnight Channel doesn't suit them. No, that's an understatement; that place wasn't made for people, wasn't made for people-who-turned-into-demons. Souji scribbles a sentence tiredly across his page and crosses it out again, half-heartedly. His pencil-tip pokes through the paper and he exhales noisily through his nose. "What," he says and scratches his neck. That's where his atma is, Yosuke thinks, that black brand that burns silvery-white when Izanagi stirs in him, when he breathes in the poison-yellow fog in the T.V. world and his form shifts.

"D'you think the teachers think we're a group of thugs?" he asks. Souji stares at him; his eyes look hollow and tired beneath the sweep of his hair. "I mean, with the, the ... you know."

"No," Souji replies. He slumps a little in his seat. Good thing the library's so empty today, Yosuke doesn't fancy their chances with many people in the vicinity; he's always hungry now, a gnawing, perpetual edge that chews on his nerves and simmers in the pit of his stomach. Wow, he's never going to complain about cheap Junes-packaged food again, he misses those days when all he had to do was shell out some money and get a full meal.

The problem with power, he thinks, is the price of it. The price of power in this world is a demon in his head and the hunger, the fact that all he thinks about in class these days is how tasty the fingers of the girl by the window will be between his teeth. He'll crack them with his molars, break her carpals and phalanges, suck the marrow and gulp down the fat and the tendon. Then he'll work his way up, gnaw at the knot of bones in her wrists and push his canines into her forearm -

His atma brand pulses on on his back and he has to stop himself there. God, he wants to throw up. Not that it'll help, not that there's anything that will come up. Instead he clenches and unclenches his fingers, watches his skin stretch and ease across his knuckles. "I mean, they look like tattoos. They must think we're, what, a group of delinquents? King Moron would've had a field day trying to give us detention for just sneezing, and, well, Kashiwagi seems to like it, she'd make easy prey, huh."

"They're not all visible," Souji says after a moment's pause. He fingers his collar absently, tugs it higher up out of force of habit. Well, Yosuke thinks, at least his habit of popping collars finally comes in handy. He thinks about the warm pulse along the side of Souji's throat; he thinks about biting into the thin skin, his teeth puncturing fine capillaries and through the cartilage of his windpipe. That's the ultimate show of loyalty and kinship, isn't it, baring your throat to someone? Wait, he probably has it wrong, he's supposed to be the one doing it because he's not the leader, right?

"... and don't say things like that, she'll take it as an invitation." Souji's saying, apparently unaware of Yosuke gazing fixedly at his Adam's apple. He lowers his voice into something husky, something suggestive that makes Yosuke twice as uneasy, twice as inclined to lean over and lap at his throat and allow his teeth break the skin. "My, my, boys, if I had any idea you felt that way, you could _eat me up any day._"

"Woah, no, stop, time out." Yosuke pauses, gazes down and scrapes his eraser across his page until the paper's translucent and onion-skin thin; it tears, a ragged gash across cheap blue-lined notepaper. He's so hungry. So hungry. Maybe they could share, flesh grows back ... eventually. "But, uh, I mean, we sure sorta look the part. I bet they think you're the gang leader, you sure look it."

"Shut up," Souji says and begins to pack his bag.

"No, I'm serious!" Yosuke says. "We've got that lean, mean look down pat, don't you think?"

"Ha, ha." Souji tucks his chair back under the table and stands. It's been, what, half a year since he arrived from the city and it's really something how time can change a person, how being an always-hungry monster highlights the hollowness of your cheeks and the dullness of your eyes. "Let's go," he says and Yosuke slings his bag over his shoulder and follows.

Like he always does; at least some things never change.

.

Some things never change, he thinks.

Some things never change. Yosuke gets home; he kicks his shoes off and dumps his bag on his bed. He clomps down the stairs, raids the fridge, rips the clingwrap off a tray of beef chunks and picks them out without washing his hands. Fat lot of difference a bit of bacteria will make to having a demon virus running through his veins. He gulps down the meat and licks his fingers; it sort of feels just like the meat they feed on in the Midnight Channel, because the creatures that prowl through its winding labyrinthine floors are the ones tough and gristly, the ones whose flesh stick in his teeth.

After that he runs his tongue over his back teeth; he will try to ignore the ferrous tang of the blood and wish for traces of lymph. He will sit and flip aimlessly through the T.V. channels, check the missing-person reports that increase in frequency as the days wear on; sometimes there'll be a missing pet or two but that doesn't really matter and besides, they make poor substitutes for other demons.

Then before his parents get home he'll make the shaky trek back upstairs and to the bathroom and empty his stomach contents into the toilet or sink, whichever he can reach first. Man, it sucks because human stomachs are weak and reject anything at the drop of the hat. Sometimes, he thinks about transforming, about letting the plates and bone and chitin grow out of him - they sprout from the back of his skull, from his palms; his jaws will fuse, he'll be blind, sightless - but Jiraiya doesn't need eyes, not when he's got other senses. Eating with that big mouth on his chest will be easy, though.

If he does, man, what's he going to do if his parents come home and he's stuck mid-transformation? When he's got Jiraiya's huge yellow fangs bared and snapping, mandibles shifting in time to wrenching pain from his clavicle and sternum. What's he going to say, _oh, sorry, you got me at a bad time, no big deal, hold these empty trays while I shift back, okay?_

Sometimes he gets lucky and there are rare items swimming in the murky pools of bile and half-digested meat. Yosuke always washes them out at least three times with soap and detergent and collects them in a box to pass to Souji at another time. He's got quite a collection, now - curled loops of bead chains; packets of charcoal pills, the foil slightly eaten by the stomach acid; things to sell to Daidara like eyeballs and horns because, hey, even man-eating demons need money, what a joke.

Man, it must be nice to not have to worry about all that. Sometimes he thinks about things like that when he should be doing his homework; sometimes he thinks of a world where Jiraiya's in a part of him that doesn't entail ripping through his flesh and bone and reshaping it in his image. Sometimes he thinks about not having to fight with teeth and claws and not doubling over every time he wolfs down something too fast and has to choke down the pills as someone strokes his throat because, fuck, water's a scarcity there.

Yeah, that'd be nice.

.

"Maybe," he says one day by the Samegawa, after he tells Souji about everything, about being second fiddle and second best, about wanting, for once, to matter. "We should spar. I mean, um, maybe you could, well, beat all this stupid negativity and doubt out of me, and I bet if we did this more often as practise, it'd be easier than going into the T.V. all the time-"

Souji looks at him like he's crazy. He probably is, for suggesting such a thing. "No," Souji says flatly.

Yosuke falls silent after that. The resentment burns under his skin - is that Susano-O? Susano-O's the stubborn and uncooporative sort, on breezy days like these he feels even more irritable than he already does with the hunger and the frustration from getting nowhere.

"We'd kill each other," Souji says quietly. He's very still, very calm and the way he says it is so much worse. Yosuke thinks about his knuckles cracking into Souji's cheekbones, the way his skin will split and rupture and bruise from the impact. He thinks about the tang of blood in the air, the instinctive shift that begins as a bone-deep ache between his shoulderblades.

"Yeah, you're right," he instead and leaves it at that.

.

"We're going in today," Souji snarls.

Yosuke doesn't blame Souji, not one bit because Namatame's gone and taken Nanako in with him because he's finally figured out where the missing people have gone to, he's finally figured out that some of the kids he thinks he saved have ended up monsters themselves and the others, well. As for the others, the ones who gazed fearfully at the cameras and pleaded for the return of their loved ones, well. Too bad for them, because they're now amino acids and god knows what else, broken down to fuel the hunger of a ragtag group of demons trying to find the source of all their troubles. They were the ones that went berserk almost immediately, the ones that attacked on sight and lost their reason from being so unsuccessful in their hunts, from being in the yellow-fogged world for too long. He probably thinks he's saving Nanako, oh the irony, he probably thinks he's saving her from a pack of hungry beasts baying for his blood. All flawed reasoning, maybe he thinks he can protect her while he's in there with her when he'll probably devour her himself once the virus infects him, too.

"Okay," Yosuke says when Souji glowers at them in turn as though challenging them to speak against him. Naoto doesn't say anything. She hasn't said much since she joined them, but it's probably because she's like Chie, because even after all these months she hasn't adapted well to chewing the Kubo kid up and faking the reports.

When they're making their way through Heaven everyone's quiet. It'd be better if they didn't have to keep fighting for their lives every time they went in but that bites, it's a demon-eat-demon world there. What a joke. It's all a big cosmic joke and somewhere, a god is laughing.

They round a corner. A demon snarls at them and Yosuke lets go of his wrenches as he transforms, as Souji and Teddie beside him shift and distort, their outlines giving way to teeth and claws and armour plates.


End file.
